As Central and East Europeans (including Germans) strive to build new democracies on the ruins of old dictatorships, they seek to establish democratic values as well as democratic institutions. They know that democratic institutions alone were not able to save democracy in Germany's Weimar Republic, which had also risen out of the collapse of an authoritarian regime. West Germans, though, later built a viable democracy, the Federal Republic, from even more devastated and authoritarian remnants. To help explain such differing outcomes, historians have posited changes in political values, arguing that West Germans developed a democratic political culture to replace the authoritarian values many Germans had held earlier. As illuminating as such arguments could be, historians have had great difficulty finding evidence on just what political values Germans, especially common citizens, have in fact held at various times.

The significance of the Locarno treaties remains one of the central issues of the interwar period. Did they mark, as Austen Chamberlain claimed, ‘the real dividing line between the years of war and the years of peace’ or were they, at best, a truce masking the incompatible ambitions of France and Germany and, at worst, a first act of appeasement by which France and Britain obtained security for the Rhineland at the expense of Poland and Czechoslovakia? A different approach is offered by economic history: from this perspective the significant events are seen as the defeat of the French occupation of the Ruhr and the acceptance of the Dawes Plan in July 1924. France had to abandon its attempt to break the power of German industry and had to accept the British and American view that European peace required German economic recovery. The Locarno treaties may be seen simply as the best arrangements that France could make for its security following this decisive defeat.

A century ago Friedrich Engels reflected that if a European league for barricade-building was established, Barcelona would emerge in top position. The same deep rebellious traditions of the Catalan capital prompted the English hispanophile Gerald Brenan to describe Barcelona as ‘the most revolutionary city in Europe’. The 1930s confirmed this reputation: during the years assessed in this article barricades were thrown up in the working-class districts of Barcelona on at least eight different occasions. What is interesting, however, is that although the local authorities and business groups were understandably perturbed by the threat of social mobilisation, the proven capacity of the security forces to contain the challenge of the barricades meant that the danger of urban insurrection was not the greatest continuing worry of the ‘law-and-order’ lobby. Instead, the dominant concern of the self-proclaimed ‘lovers of order’ in Barcelona was the wave of armed illegality (atracaments) which rocked the city throughout the 1930s.1

The part played by economists in the Second World War has been little studied but was of an importance not appreciated by the public then or since. Equally, wartime experience had an influence on the development of economics as a discipline that has been given little attention. It was in the Second World War that economists in any number entered government service, discovered government, exercised a major influence on policy and left behind an expanding demand for economic advice from professional economists. This article seeks to provide a sketch of some of their activities.

Over the past two decades, the rapid development of historical studies on the family has tended to neglect almost completely the relationship between the family and politics. On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Journal of Family History in 1987, Louise Tilly analysed the content of articles published on the family in eight historical journals (including the Journal of Family History) between 1976 and 1985. Of 233 articles on the family, just two were listed under the heading ‘Politics–Institutions’.2 Family history has made great strides in a whole number of areas: in the understanding of the origins of the modern family, an enquiry launched by the path-breaking work of Philippe Ariès in i960; in the development of family reconstruction technique, initiated in the post-war period by Louis Henry and Pierre Goubert, and pursued with signal distinction by the Cambridge Group, founded in 1964; in the critiques and further refinement of the findings of the Cambridge Group, with the development, in particular, of studies on the life course; in the area of intra-family relations, especially in the analysis of the historic subordination of women within the family; in the study, finally, of the interaction between the family and major socio-economic transformation, especially industrialisation, emigration and urbanisation.3

With the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have come to a turning point, perhaps the most important turning point, in the short but complex history of nuclear strategy. The Cold War is now history, albeit the sort of history that we will be living with for a long time yet. It is therefore time to review the policies and strategies of the Cold War in a historical perspective. In this essay, it is NATO's nuclear strategy during the Cold War that will be the subject of such a review.2

The Bolsheviks considered the family to be a minor matter. The ABC of Communism, a popular exposition of Bolshevik Marxism published shortly after the October Revolution, detailed the economic and political institutions of Soviet Russia with only a passing reference to the public services that would emancipate women in the future society.1 Its authors, Nikolai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhenskii, understood the revolutionary process chiefly as the by-product of economic development and expected socialism to come through the manipulation of economic mechanisms by central government, and in this they echoed the views of their party. The Bolshevik scenario did not preclude the ‘participation of the masses’ to use the vocabulary of the times. Individuals, women as well as men, were to enjoy unprecedented access to the political process, and as masters of the nation's resources would decide matters of state, each acting as part of the whole, or more exactly as part of a number of collectivities, first and foremost as members of the proletariat, but also as members of other groups including nationality, youth and women. While families in the past had played a crucial role in the creation and transmission of private property, with the overthrow of the exploitative capitalist system they would cease to function as providers of economic and psychological welfare. Instead the individual's social place and action would be determined by class and, to a lesser extent, by ethnicity, age and gender. Families belonged to the superstructure and were symptom rather than cause; they adapted to the needs of society, changing in response to the transformation of economic relations. Families, in other words, could look after themselves, and appropriate forms of private life would evolve without much outside intervention.

The problems of decolonisation in post-Second World War France have attracted renewed attention in recent years. A new generation of historians and political scientists has focused on why it was so difficult for the country's political and intellectual élites to accept the end of empire. This attention to the subjectivity of policy and opinion-makers has added a novel dimension to understanding how and why the end of the colonial era occurred with such difficulty and bloodshed for the French. This new orientation has largely displaced the old ‘Gaullist’ explanation for the failing of France's post-war regime, the Fourth Republic, in colonial policy. The older notion, articulated by General Charles de Gaulle himself during his twelve-year exile from political power between 1946 and 1958, blamed the unstable parliamentary coalitions and governing political parties of the era for the series of crises and disasters in colonial policy faced by a deeply fractured legislative regime. The rapid rise and fall of governments, the turnover of ministers, the constant governmental disputes on a range of questions, it was alleged, was the cause of inconsistent and weak policies incapable of meeting the succession of crises. The newer research, however, has demonstrated that the institutional problems of the Fourth Republic were not the key issue and that the essential problem lay with an inability of élites to recognise, accept and adapt to decolonisation worldwide. It has been shown that, far from having inconsistent or weak policies, the governing cadres of the Fourth Republic shared fundamentally similar concepts and goals in their determination to maintain the integrity of the French Empire. Yet this same historiography has focused on the political parties, pressure groups and shifting political landscape of French colonial policy while largely overlooking an important, though less obvious, player.

‘King takes Queen’. This is how John Sweeney summed up his view of the state visit by Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu to Britain in June 1978, an event which marked the high point of what the Times referred to as ‘Britain's political romance with Romania’ in the 1970s. Sweeney's book, in common with other post-revolutionary writing on Romania, roundly condemns Britain's foreign policy-makers for supporting a repressive regime.1 However, in the 1970s the situation was not viewed in such clear-cut terms. In the early part of the decade, books by British writers praised Ceausescu, and Romania often received favourable coverage in the British press.2 It was almost universally seen as a country which, although internally rigidly communist, pursued an independent foreign policy and was consequently a thorn in the flesh of the Soviet Union. It was keen to industrialise and to expand its economic ties with the West in order to do so. Apologists for British policy would argue that it was therefore both politically and economically beneficial to support Ceausescu. Politically it would weaken Moscow's control over the Eastern Bloc, and economically it would benefit British industry. Indeed, the two were related – the more economic ties Ceausescu had with the West, the stronger his political independence from Moscow would become.

A country's family policy reflects, either directly or indirectly, the attitude of government, parliament and society to the family as an institution. The way in which a government deals with families, whether it gives them financial support, and why and how it does so, reveals the objectives of its family policy, and also ultimately its population policy.

Although the industrialised West has seen since the 1970s a very marked leaning to the right both in government and in popular politics, the experience of the British Conservative Party has been unique. The party can trace a continuous existence to the reconstruction of the King's government by William Pitt the Younger in 1784, and is probably the oldest political organisation in the world: far older, indeed, than most sovereign states. In two centuries of life it has transformed itself from the party of monarchy, aristocracy and the Established Church into a highly successful practitioner of mass politics. It has been in government, either as the sole party of government or as the dominant partner in coalition, for seventy years in the last hundred, and thirty-two years in the last fifty. This remarkable political achievement can be explained at many levels; the purpose of this article is to explore just one of them. By bringing together the explanatory insights of political scientists working on electoral sociology with the records of the party in government and opposition, it is possible to discern how the Conservatives used the opportunities of government to cultivate the society which tended, and increasingly tends, to give them victory at the ballot box. This cultivation of the political environment was not exactly social engineering – a project which contemporary Conservatives emphatically reject – but in tune with the biological metaphor of the title of this paper it could be called ‘social gardening’. The first part of the article examines very briefly how political scientists have come to understand the functioning of the British electoral process since the Second World War. The second part explores the process of adaptation which has enabled the Conservative Party to dominate British politics since the war.

Traditional histories of the Italian ‘Economic Miracle’ have concentrated on two phenomena: the factory and migration. The family has occupied a position of secondary importance, being treated as of lesser interest than ‘other’ arenas of everyday life, in particular the workplace. Those who have eulogised the miracle have underlined the massive effort and sacrifice of millions of workers in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Those who oppose the ‘ideology’ behind the boom have looked to the latent conflicts (and problems) produced by unplanned economic development – frictions which were to explode in 1968. The reality was a complicated combination of both these interpretations. Some took the road of opposition to the system, many millions lapped up the values of the boom, most were affected in some way by both ‘world-views’. The relationship between the family and the boom was a two-way one. The Italian family had as much effect on the ‘miracle’ as the ‘miracle’ did on the family (in much the same way that mass internal migration was both a cause and a consequence of the boom). Each shaped and moulded the other in various and crucial ways. The family was Janus-faced, ‘both a custodian of tradition and an agent of change’.2